


i'm addicted to the way you hurt (i don't mind if you fuck up my life)

by lostandlonelybirds (RUNNFROMTHEAK)



Series: Birthday Gifts <3 [3]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Wayne is Bad at Feelings, Cause I'm Fucking Right, Character Study, Depressed Dick Grayson, Depression, Dick Grayson Has Issues, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson is Bad at Feelings, Dick Grayson-centric, Dick Grayson/Jason Todd-centric, Dissociation, Earth-11 (DCU), F/F, Female Dick Grayson, Female Jason Todd, Forever Evil Arc (DCU), Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt Dick Grayson, Implied Dubcon Sex, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Lazarus Pit (DCU), Lazarus Pit Madness, Mental Anguish, Mental Health Issues, Morally Ambiguous Dick Grayson, Mutual Pining, No Beta We Die Like Dick Grayson Actually Did In Forever Evil And You Can Fight Me On That, POV Dick Grayson, Post-Batman Incorporated (2012) Issue 08, Resurrected Dick Grayson, Rule 63, Self-Hatred, Spuffy Vibes, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29856924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RUNNFROMTHEAK/pseuds/lostandlonelybirds
Summary: Everything hurts. Breathing hurts, tastes like grave dirt she’s never felt, like poison as air drifts into her lungs despite her desires. Thinking hurts, feels like hundreds of nails digging into her skull, cutting her open and leaving her as exposed as her unmasking had. Feeling hurts, aching like a bleeding stab wound, like pinpricks of ice-rain teasing her bare skin until it’s blue.Everything is overwhelming, a sea of sensation constantly breaking down the few mental barriers she manages to construct until she’s drowning in the painful glare of neon lights, the suspicion lingering in narrowed gazes, the slow-creeping darkness lingering in the gap where her heart should be but isn’t, the hum of air around her, the feeling of ice on dead skin.Richelle Grayson isn’t dead, but she wonders if she should be.
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd
Series: Birthday Gifts <3 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1883293
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	i'm addicted to the way you hurt (i don't mind if you fuck up my life)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bitterleafs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitterleafs/gifts).



> For the lovely crow, who I am blessed to call my friend, and who deserves only nice things. Have this, which is far less than you deserve you wonderful human being <3 <3
> 
> Fic title from Monsters by All Time Low ft blackbear and chapter title from Sing to Me by Missio.
> 
> Enjoy <3

When she comes back to life, her world is a nuclear green.

She’s embraced by something; it cradles her, like she’s a precious bundle of jewels, like something perfect to be coveted. There’s warmth where she rests her head, breasts pillowed beneath her, and she’s held close enough to feel that rhythmic cadence like a siren call to life.

There’s a body against her, arms under her, the chilling tides of glowing green lapsing around her and the body holding her. Waves of it hit her, foreign sensations and the scent of rot, of _otherness_ , permeating her black barriers of nothingness. For a moment, her eyes are shut, her body is lax, her ears are silent, her nose is useless. For a moment, she doesn’t exist in reality, doesn’t exist beyond shadowed memories and melancholic recollections, beyond wished-upon stars and a neat tombstone.

Bryce’s eyes are cool when they meet hers, flat like flint and nearly black with dark reflections, and the warmth evaporates from her skin like acetone left to dry.

(The water, however, is slick and wet against her skin, whispers and murmurs of lethality and danger. It invites itself into her core, insidious and simple, lecherous the moment Bryce’s arms tighten, the moment Richelle’s name and life and death and memories flood her conscious awareness like the worst sort of hangover. As the warmth leaves, the cold enters, and it makes itself a home, and she will never be warm again.)

For a moment, she is dead, and she knows she’s dead, and it’s okay.

The moment passes, and Richelle Mary Grayson is alive, and nothing is okay ever again.

* * *

Jace’s eyelids are camera shutters, and her eyes are lenses that seem to capture Richelle. It’s a worshipful gaze, almost reverent, like a prayer with no definable words or a hymn with no known notes. Something warm and whole and settled in dark depths of nuclear green, the first color she’d known in her second take on life.

“How?” Jace breathes, suddenly _there_ and edged with warmth like a fact Richelle can’t feel; the illusion of things she’s lost since losing her life. “When…?”

Richelle’s chest tightens when Jace touches her, when a hand holds Richelle’s bicep in a death grip, when sulfur-blood-rain-menthol assaults her nose as Jace’s hand cups her cheek, when she can taste half a pack of cigarettes in the decreasing space between them like a smoke cloud. Jace’s eyes gleam, liquid and heated and so full of indescribable things, and the sheen of tears feels like an offering burnt at her alter (she shouldn’t have an alter; she’s never _deserved_ an alter).

“Tonight,” Bryce says in a tight voice, startling Richelle. She doesn’t turn to look at her mentor, but she feels B’s eyes on her. “The al Ghul’s were willing.”

“ _Now?_ ” Jace’s voice drips with disdain, half a snarl curling in her downturned lips. Richelle eyes her warily. “They were never willing before.”

“Thing change,” Bryce says, limp and flat in the charged space of the Batcave. It’s a signal to end that line of inquiry, a stubbornness brought on by B’s intrinsic need to hoard details without relinquishing them because she “knows best”.

(and part of Richelle, the eight-year-old girl in a pixie cut kneeling in her parents’ blood and screaming screams no one would hear, used to think that. That part of her had lived by it, by the _Batwoman knows best_ motto Gordon and Bullock and every other non-criminal citizen have to choke down to stay sane. That part of her had suffocated, Luthor’s crisp hand over her mouth. That part of her had died. That part of her hadn’t come back.

Bryce Wayne hadn’t known best when her Little Wing had died, after all.)

(and part of Richelle, the twenty-something woman grieving a mother and playing detective and raising a kid she’s only just learned about, doesn’t believe it. Has _never_ believed it. That part of her had bled it, sweat it out on the daily. That part of her had buried it in the ground under various headstones in the stretches of dead people on Wayne Manor’s grounds. That part of her had missed one funeral and conducted the other and been the indirect cause of the third. That part of her had been a mentor and a daughter and a mother and buried each piece with raw grief and pain and anger cutting her to bits. That part of her lives. That part has never left.

Bryce Wayne hadn’t known best when her Little Bird had died, after all.)

“How long was I gone?” Richelle whispers, so soft she doesn’t realize she’d said it aloud until Jace looks at her with that warm, wonder-filled worship she doesn’t know how to decipher. She moves her gaze to just over Jace’s right shoulder, somewhere she can look without seeing feelings she doesn’t know how to deal with.

“One hundred and three days today. Except today doesn’t count, does it?”

“No,” Richelle murmurs, feeling Jace’s fingers squeeze her arm briefly, knowing those green eyes are crinkled in a smile Richelle can’t mimic. “I guess not.”

* * *

Her resurrection doesn’t burn like Jace’s had, like she’d expected it too. Resurrection doesn’t choke her, doesn’t hurt her. It fries her senses, overloading them until she feels nothing, is nothing but sensations her broken brain can’t process. Resurrection has a different poison to it for her. It freezes, ice crystals like shards dragging through her blood, down her throat, as the toxic air is inhaled and exhaled, as her heart beats an unwanted candor. Damia’s dead, and she’d wanted to be with her, be reunited, but Bryce can’t let her swiss-army knife rot, can’t let Richelle be happy when happiness comes as decomposition and puts her out of play. She doesn’t have the mind left to feel hurt by it, to feel that bitter coil of simmering resentment or betrayal or even disappointment, because she doesn’t care. She doesn’t feel.

Life tastes like ashes on her tongue. Air chokes her, like that suffocating hand over her mouth and nose from when she’d dug her way from what felt like purgatory into what she knows is Hell. She’s the eldest, of course, and she’s the best at what Bryce needs. The best at rolling over when her mentor asks no matter how much she fights and rages against it initially. It makes sense Bryce would use her tools, and Richelle’s always been a capable tool.

Jace told her once that she’s all bark and no bite, rage burning harmlessly beneath her skin until there’s nothing left to actually _hurt_ people. Jace’s the opposite. Her rage smolders, slow and steady, until all it does is hurt. Sometimes, they both blame the pit, but Richelle knows in her heart of hearts that the pit doesn’t make things out of thin air. They come from within, _deep_ within, exposed like an electrified wire with the protective coating peeled off. It’s not the pit’s fault you’re burnt, not when it just removed the pretty packaging to show what ugliness already there.

It’s not the hand’s fault she’s numb, not the hand’s fault she can’t cope, but damn her if blaming it (and Luthor) doesn’t feel better than blaming herself. People praise her for her empathy, her compassion, the way she bleeds life and love and all that other cheesy crap – (“ _Richelle Grayson_ ,” Clara says, a fond smile playing on her lips, “ _the Multiverse Constant_.”) – but she’s lost that. Somewhere between death and the return trip, she’s lost that oh-so vital part of herself, lost the ability to _feel_ like she’s supposed to. To _smile_ like she’s supposed to. They’re all fake, every last one, but Damia’s not here to point them out so no one notices. No one cares. Not when Timmie’s distracted with case work, and Cass is off in Hong Kong with Steph, and Bar is still not pleased with her for a variety of elephants in a very tense room.

Jace sees it, Jace calls her out on it, but Jace uses it against her. Uses it as a weapon, a pre-emptive defense mechanism locked and loaded on the cracked walls around her hollow heart, the weak tethers holding Richelle together as her life sits in the bottom of a bottle because it’s the only place she can stand being, even when Damia’s resurrected, it’s the only place she can stand existing, because everything is too much, too fast, too loud, too hard.

Everything hurts. _Breathing_ hurts, tastes like grave dirt she’s never felt, like poison as air drifts into her lungs despite her desires. _Thinking_ hurts, feels like hundreds of nails digging into her skull, cutting her open and leaving her as exposed as her unmasking had. _Feeling_ hurts, aching like a bleeding stab wound, like pinpricks of ice-rain teasing her bare skin until it’s blue.

Everything is overwhelming, a sea of sensation constantly breaking down the few mental barriers she manages to construct until she’s drowning in the painful glare of neon lights, the suspicion lingering in narrowed gazes, the slow-creeping darkness lingering in the gap where her heart _should_ be but isn’t, the hum of air around her, the feeling of ice on dead skin.

Richelle Grayson isn’t dead, but she wonders if she should be.

* * *

The thing about love is Bryce Martha Wayne has never been taught _how_ to love. For all things her mentor knows, for all things her mentor excels at, love has never been one of them. Bryce’s love is conditional and polar, contingent upon lists of stipulations and standards, as capable of warming as it is of freezing. Richelle knows B’s polarity best of all, has felt her warmth in the wake of horrible grief, has felt her ice in the wake of bruises and bullets. Richelle knows this, knows Bryce inside and out, and still is surprised when they come to blows.

It’s over a mission, like it often is. Richelle’s still cold, still numb, still fundamentally altered in some horrible way. Richelle’s still dead to the world, still stuck in an endless cycle of grief and loss as she thinks of her Robin and pretends she’s alive still and remembers she isn’t. Richelle is there and not there, and B wants her to go to Spyral and pretend she’s still dead.

Richelle says no, says that word she so often forgets, and Bryce picks a fight.

(She wins and loses. Richelle is bloody and broken and bruised, and Bryce is only bloody and bruised. She’s died and come back and the things about death is it changes a person in a way even love can’t. Bryce doesn’t know how to love a person because no one ever taught her, and Richelle knows how to love a person but only in extremes. She loves in death and pain, in sacrifice and loss because that’s how life has taught her to love.

She loves her parents through a mantle crafted from her old life.

She loves Jace and Timmie through Joker’s last laugh, choked and bloody.

She loves Dami through Heretic’s corpse.

She loves Kor and Don and countless others through bruises and scars and hits taken in their place.

She loves the world with her death.

 ~~She hates it with her life~~.)

* * *

She starts drinking two months into her new life as Agent 37, far from home and aching for things she doesn’t know how to voice anymore.

She drinks to drown out the dreams and nightmares of Dami, to forget the way Luthor’s skin had felt against her mouth and smelt over her nose. She drinks to forget the way a heartbeat slows and stutters deprived of oxygen, to forget the way Lazarus waters look lapsing at her reanimated carcass.

Jace calls her, sometimes. On secured lines when B’s too busy to bother. Jace offers shitty jokes Richelle used to make and updates on people she tries to love (but love, like most things, feels like an echo resounding through an empty hallway, like a memory of something long gone and lost that she’s desperately trying to understand and recall but can’t). Jace calls her _Richie_ and _Pretty Bird_ and _Grayson_ and Richelle tries to remember those are her names. Tries to remember she’s a person with a past and a future and a heartbeat and loved ones.

Here, she’s just a number and a body and a memory.

So she drinks.

* * *

On good days, Richelle's eyes are blue. Normal and familiar and azure. Her skin is a familiar gold, albeit more scarred. Her hair is silky-smooth and flat. On good days, she can look in the mirror and feel nothing at all but boredom. Mild irritation. Her scars are covered by clothes, and there's no memory of a hand over her nose and mouth.

On bad days, Richelle's eyes burn green. Supernatural and unfamiliar and fluorescent. Her skin is pale and ashen, covered in blood that isn't hers and tears that feel like someone else's. Her hair is tangled and twisted and greased with oil from her fingers, from stress and anxiety and too much fidgeting and guilt. On bad days, she can't look at the mirror at all. Her scars are on full display and the memory of that hand is consuming.

* * *

Sometimes, when she’s feeling particularly masochistic, she looks up Jace’s kills. Counts them, speaks their names, waits for the self-loathing to kick in when she realizes they’d died days before or after a call with her. When she realizes Jace could have answered Richelle’s call with their blood on her hands, gun still smoking.

It never does, and the lack of it triggers it.

She should hate her not-so-Little Wing for going against what they’re supposed to stand for. She should resent her for every heartbeat ended, every life extinguished. Richelle doesn’t.

(because there’s a last laugh choked with blood and a burning corpse called Heretic. Because she’d be a hypocrite. Because she sometimes does resent and hate, bouncing between two opinions knowing neither is truly right and neither is hers but she’s too dead inside to have one of her own. To care.

She should preach the religion of the Bat the way she had once, but she’s never been a prophet. Playing perfect is her default, and she plays it well.)

* * *

Her return doesn’t go over well, unsurprisingly. Six months since her resurrection and no one is happy, least of all her. She doesn't feel much, and of what she does feel, happiness isn't there.

Timmie’s pissed and Barry’s disappointed and Cass looks at her like he can see right through her and Steph is on Timmie’s side. Her friends pretend not to be bothered and Don yells at her for a solid hour before hugging the life out of her for two.

(B, as per normal, pretends nothing is wrong and Richelle follows that lead. Pretending, after all, is what Bats do. She’s always excelled at deception; the people who smile the most have the most to hide.)

Jace still plays at friendly with an edge, eyes hot and dark, glinting green in shadowed corners. They’re friends, kind of. They go for drinks and buddy up on busts and offer a helping hand for patrols. It’s the kind of friendship you resent, the one where they know your demons and see your mistakes and can point out your flaws. The kind where they call you on your shit and you can’t pretend they’re wrong. Despite that, despite the unwanted insight and unasked for honesty, being with Jace is easier than being with her friends or family. Easier still when that initial softness sharpens, when Jace throws barbs Richelle can return with ease.

She feels real with Jace, feels present.

Still, she drinks, clinging to the bottle like a raft in the tumultuous sea living is. It numbs the numbness, fuzzes the harsh edges of reality, and it makes things dealable. Makes people bearable. She drinks, and she lets Jace see through her even as she denies every insight there, and she pretends to be okay with everyone else.

Jace is her friend, kind of, and she’s okay with that. Clings to it along with the drinking.

(Of course, it doesn’t stay like that. That’s just the beginning, the _once upon a time_ of her messed up catastrophe.

It starts like that. It starts with her in pain, more pain than she can ignore and more pain than she can safely acknowledge without crumbling pathetically like a sandcastle swept into the sea, and it starts with Jace’s jade eyes narrowing in on it like a sniper. It starts with her feeling nothing and everything, and Jace’s harsh realism cutting through the hazy fog drinking leaves her in.

It starts with friendship in between streetlights, conversations high above the city when everyone else is gone and it’s just them and whatever criminals they’re up against. It starts there and devolves to arguments when Jace is too rough, when Richelle’s too numb, when they disagree on methods or when Jace is too soft. That gives way to fighting between friendship, bruises and blood like late-night texts shared. Adrenaline is a cohesive agent between them, more effective than oxytocin by far.

It starts with fighting, but it doesn’t stay there. It _never_ stays there. In a fucked up whatever-ship like hers and Jace’s, there’s no de-escalation. No safe exit, turn-right-off-fucked-into-healthy-relationships-city. There’s now, and there’s later, and getting anywhere is _always_ some kind of escalation.

This is just an escalation of a _different_ kind, not as unexpected as she would’ve claimed before her death. Jace had maintained a thinly veiled interest in certain… _assets_ before and after death, and for all the venomous words, her gaze still lingers, sweeping and heated.

Thin line between love and hate (or what Richelle pretends is hate), after all.

Thinner still between hating someone and wanting them. _Nonexistent_ , as it would seem here.)

* * *

The thing about sex is it’s best when Richelle doesn’t love them or care about them. It’s best with strangers in bars where everyone knows it’s only one night and only one time and it’s never going to amount to anything more. It’s best when there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain and it doesn’t matter if she can’t commit because _they_ can’t either.

Unfortunate for her that sex and friendship go hand in hand, that Jace is unfairly gorgeous.

Jace’s lips are red, unassuming, and she wonders how they’d feel against her own. Wonders how that red would look drifting across her skin, messy and debauched. Her long hair is tucked into a neat bun, expertly clipped into place, and the dress she’s in fits her like a glove, stunning and lethal as always. Jace is a weapon, even if she prefers the distant precision of a gun ( _unlike Richelle, who is weapon by fists and lips and body heat and charisma, more intimate by far_ ). Richelle hadn’t exactly planned for this, but damn her if Jace’s attention doesn’t send a cold thrill shooting down her spine.

“Are you following me?” she asks, voice flat out of exhaustion more than any emotional repression. She doesn’t repress, after all. She just doesn’t feel anything. Just the hazy outline of things, the void left in their place.

Jace shrugs, teeth shark-like as they slip into a familiar grin. Danger, it screams, but Richelle’s never really heeded warning signs ever.

“And if I am?”

Richelle mimes her shrug.

“I could kick your ass.”

Jace’s eyes burn, Lazarus flames searing against her skin as they drag over her. She can feel them roam, can feel them take in the Nightwing blue dress with a high slit and matching heels, can feel them narrow in on her blue-painted lips, eager for tasting. Despite knowing better, she gives into the impulse to drag her tongue across them, uncaring if they’re smudged now. Jace’s glinting eyes are reward enough, lips parting almost imperceptibly. Richelle, of course, perceives. She’s always been good at noticing things Jace doesn’t want her to.

“You could,” Jace agrees, “but where’s the fun in that?”

Richelle’s lips tick up, almost against her will.

“Satisfaction in doing the right thing?”

Jace outright laughs at that, fingers curled and tight around the flute of a champagne glass. She raises it mockingly, and it doesn’t piss Richelle off half as much as it should. It doesn’t make her feel anything but a faint flicker of amusement, a trickle down the deep well of dried of feelings where it would’ve been a flood before.

“Ever the Golden Girl, ain’t ya?”

Jace’s rough accent slips in towards the end, familiar as cigarette smoke and elusive as shadows in daylight. She’d heard it more when they’d been on better terms, before the whole faked/not-faked death, before a lot of things. It had been a sign of trust. An imperfection shown to her consciously, with intent.

“You know I’m not.”

Jace leans closer, warmth emanating from her curved form in the space between them. There’s distance sure, but it feels nonexistent when their eyes lock. Richelle feels exposed, like the core of an apple beneath an effective peeler, apple-red shine stripped away before a hunger shining through Jace’s faked aggression. There’s a power in it, one she’d seen even before, but there’s a vulnerability too. Jace can see her ugliness, beneath all her facades and placations. Jace sees her flaws and scars and traumas and damages, and Richelle’s never been good with being seen.

“Do I?”

Jace’s close, all of a sudden, too close. Inching closer and closer, warm breath fanning across Richelle’s cheeks, spiraling as a skin-deep flush. Intoxicating…She can smell the bubbly champagne on Jace’s breath, the smoke of a fresh cigarette clinging weakly to her, just beneath some overpriced perfume. She thinks Jace will taste like ashes, like life and death and some cosmic sort of fucked up balance, because she’s been marked by both, hasn’t she? Marked in a way Richelle has.

Ashes…

She doesn’t want to taste ashes.

She pushes at Jace’s shoulder lightly, lips thinned, edging away from the collision they’ve been circling since she came back from Spyral. The collision she’s been avoiding and denying for longer than that. Jace’s reaction is immediate, all signs of languid confidence and smooth teasing shut down. Her eyes harden, cold, and her shoulders are stiff where Richelle’s hand still rests, trying to keep some semblance of control over this situation.

“I’m on duty,” she murmurs, looking anywhere but those rapidly darkening green eyes.

Jace scoffs, pulling away, and Richelle hates that the hollowness seeps back in as her skin cools.

“Whatever the excuse, right? Mommy’s favorite toy.”

She takes a deep, steadying breath, eyes cast at the floor.

“Now isn’t the time, Jace.”

She can hear the bitterness more than see it, though she’s sure Jace’s lip curls as she spits it out.

“It never is.”

* * *

It’s easier to focus with Jace gone, easier to seduce the willing target and spread her legs like she knows she has to (the way Bryce would never _ask_ her to in words, but would expect nonetheless, behind a silent stare and the ever-increasing demands of _more more more_ waiting on the tip of her tongue) to get what she needs (swiss army knife, right? Useful for every occasion). Names, locations, times. The works. He’s the kind of informant Bryce dreams about, and she’s damn lucky to find this information, but it all leaves her feeling a bit sick, the repugnant tang of his cologne lingering on her pretty dress, the vile taste of Cuban cigars and cheap whiskey lingering in her mouth (no matter how much she spits it all out).

Not cold, not numb. _Sick_.

Richelle forwards the info to Bryce without a comment or word, shutting off her phone to drown out whatever affirmations or cheaply cloaked, half-assed constructive criticism her mentor wants to offer (if she’s feeling generous, which is rare). Richelle’s skin is crawling, hundreds of thousands of little ants just beneath the surface where she can’t itch, can’t sooth. She wonders for a moment if her skin really is skin, feeling the individual flakes chitter around and around, seeing holes in the patchwork fabric, seeing gaps in the reanimated flesh, but then she remembers she’s alive, that her deadened nerves just don’t get that all the time. Feeling is scrapped into reddening skin, darkening and darkening until she manages to stop. Control, barely grasped control, always teetering on the edge of something she’s afraid of, some part of death she’d taken back with her.

She hadn’t wanted Jace before, after all. Not in this desperate, all-consuming intensity, to the point of distraction. Not in a way that made her forget herself. Not in a way that made her forget about the blood on Jace’s hands, the bruises soul-deep and skin-deep dealt between them. She hadn’t wanted Jace like this. She hadn’t wanted Jace at _all_ (at least, she thinks she hadn’t).

Further proof she’s broken. Further proof Richelle Grayson came back _wrong_.

Jace still kills. Jace still takes the heads of people who cross her, still carries lethal rounds unapologetically and has a body count Richelle’s afraid to keep track of. It’s an insurmountable barrier, a black to her white that she clings to because she _needs_ to not be broken, _needs_ to cling to the pearly-whites and easy lines she can’t cross when she feels like slipping into the macabre backsplash and forgetting just about everything she’s ever learned.

Jace is wrong because she kills. Richelle is right because she doesn’t.

It sounds weak even in the private confines of her mind, but she needs something. Some anchor, some justification. Some proof death didn’t cling to her as she left, didn’t latch onto her soul and carve out a place for it to live comfortably, leeching at what little of her remains.

Richelle doesn’t remember the journey back to her penthouse, not really. She recognizes she’s home as she starts the bath, as she dumps the remainder of her coconut bubble bath into the claw-foot tub she’d dropped a small fortune on. She remembers she’s alive as she scrubs her skin raw with a washcloth, as the itch seeps deeper and deeper, as it burns and pricks in her bloodstream, in her head, in the tissue she knows is there and can almost _feel_ in her discomfort. It’s easier to ground herself when the water burns her skin, as steam fills the room and his cologne disappears along with her dress.

She slips into the heat, head tipped back, eyes carefully shut. Memories flicker in the darkness, loose and comfortable in the void where they don’t touch her, don’t feel real. She peruses them carefully, holding onto each fading smile ( _Kor_ ), each cooling hug ( _Don_ ), each echoing laugh ( _Wally_ ), untainted by the inky spirals linked to them. Because nothing is real, as her lungs begin to burn lightly, like a lit cigarette on her skin. Nothing is real as she floats, still thinking, not feeling, problems distant and otherworldly. Nothing is real, until her body takes over and her lungs take in air in greedy, desperate gasps. Then it is all too real, burdensome knowledge slinking onto her shoulders like poisonous tendrils from one of Ivy’s plants, wrapped tight around her throat, penetrating her mouth, bleeding into her head and her heart.

It's easy to pretend she’s never died. It’s easy to pretend she’s never broken. It’s easy to lie to anyone and everyone with a goddamn _smile_.

But nothing is ever easy with Jace, least of all this. Least of all the knowledge lingering in those clouded greens. Least of all the tilt of her chin, the splay of creamy neck covered in makeup to hide scars. Least of all the way Richelle knows Jace wants her, the same way she knows, when she’s alone and in the quiet confines of her mind, that she wants Jace too.

It’s safe to admit it here. Nothing but the water is shaken by her silent confession; the cooling waves crash into her sweat-laced skin, a beratement against the makeup covered scars revealed layer by layer. The water holds no judgement in reality, only in her guilty mind. Only in the hallowed halls with doors she ventures past, doors marked bright in bloody x’s and heart-wrenching screams. Some of the screams are colored with her – her name, her scent, her sound – and others are pigmented with Damia, with Jace, with Don and every other person she’s ever lost. The list is endless, as are the doors she tries and fails to ignore carved in her mind with a macabre sort of allure, like a siren call she tries to resist because she _knows_ it leads to her doom, no matter how pretty it sounds.

But the doors are futile attempts at isolating the trauma, the pain, the bitter swell of loneliness curling in her head and heart and throat, the pleas swelling on her tongue, hitched like an unwanted passenger among the plethora of other things left unspoken. So much is unspoken, an entire reality where the words weigh on everyone other than her, where her confessions are burdened on anyone _but_ her.

Revealing the truth is a fantasy she indulges in occasionally, one chased by the taste of Jace’s lipstick and liquor where its safe, vaporous desires escaping her hands before she can ground the thoughts, make them reality. It’s not real, all ghosts and echoes and phantoms haunting her imagination.

Gruesome and beautiful and horrifyingly arousing in their _ache_ , how much she wants it despite not _wanting_ to want it.

When she looks in the mirror, her eyes are so dark they look more like pits than eyes. Holes where her soul should be. A contrast with the rest of her, with the scars she can’t see without leaning closer, with the pretty face and pretty hair she’s always been desired for. Perfect face and soulless eyes… She smiles, but it’s cold. Cold like how she feels. It’s too honest and a swell of rage surges in her. She doesn’t have the energy to control it, suppress it, when suppression is all she _is_ at this point.

She punches the glass with a frustrated cry, rivets of blood spilling down her arm like an offering. She doesn’t know what it’s an offering too.

Richelle’s eyes are wild and glinting when she looks back, and her reflection is more fitting this time. Less perfect. Less distant. Honesty in the fragmentation, in the imperfect split right down the center of her face. Disordinate and perplexing, riddled with cracks in the thin veneer of control, self-discipline. It’s too fitting, and she breaks out the bottle of liquor to celebrate.

She wonders if Damia’s looking at her from wherever she is.

She wonders if she’s disappointed.

Richelle thinks of the cape she’d used to cover Damia’s eyes as she stared down the clone, one Theseus had been unable to control, unable to stop. If it weren’t for the horror that had blossomed repentantly on that face she’d always hated, she thinks she would’ve killed him. Killed Damia’s father along with the clone. She _did_ kill the clone, after all. Set the thing on fire and watched it burn, impaled with the very thing it had murdered her Little Bird with.

A thousand justifications had spilled to the breeze, to the cold tombstone in a mausoleum of Bryce’s grief, next to Martha and Thomas Wayne and next to the empty place Jace had once resided. She’d justified it as an accident. She’d justified it as a mental break – another Joker incident. She’d justified it as not _murder_ because the thing had been a clone (she can’t think of it as human, she thinks she’ll break if she thinks of it as human). But it hadn’t been righteous. It hadn’t been _good_ or _right_.

It had been revenge, intoxicatingly sweet, like bourbon chased with caramel and blood. It had felt so fucking _good_ , and she hadn’t let herself think of it like that before. Before she came back. She hadn’t let herself acknowledge the pleasure in the bloodshed, the way that ashen corpse made her feel alive, watching the life drain from her Robin’s murderer.

She hopes that Damia’s not watching. Richelle doubts she’d recognize the parasite masquerading as her Batwoman, the monster in constricting skin. She hopes that cape still blinds her Robin, still keeps her safe from the truth carved in Richelle’s flesh.

A killer.

A murderer.

A monster.

Richelle shivers, wrapping herself in a fluffy towel that feels the same as sandpaper against her skin. Too much. Too _there_. She came back wrong, after all. She shouldn’t be surprised anymore.

(Somehow, she still is. Somehow, she always is. Surprised by the grief and the pain, surprised by the gaping hole in her chest and lack of warmth in her blood. Surprised by the way she struggles to look in a mirror and struggles to exist and struggles to breath. Always surprised. Forever surprised. She's just a ghost haunted by the living.)

* * *

It’s cold when she slips back into her too-tight façade the next morning, pleasantness and warmth like pinpricks against her hypersensitive skin. It’s always cold, but the breath of autumn is chilling down to the marrow, searing in its brumal embrace. Richelle makes a coffee and hypes herself up for the debriefing, knowing without a doubt that she must appear immaculate and kind so as to maintain her distance. She wields her friendliness as a manipulation, practiced words and reassurances dripping from her mouth like water from a broken faucet, the appearance of openness carefully maintained to create privacy. She’s begun to thrive in the words between the lines, the grey canvas carved from lies and half-truths where she paints her pain in solitude. More changed, nothing the same. Everything seems the same, on the outside, but she knows better now.

Even through her layers upon layers of luxury fabrics the cold slips in, unwanted and uninvited, burrowing deeper and deeper into her skin until she can feel it caress the pulsating walls of her unfeeling heart. She shivers, slipping into her car and blasting the heat without hesitation. The engine purrs as it comes to life, warm and alive in a way she can’t be, and she tries to push the unhelpful thought from her head as she drives.

* * *

“Those leads you secured proved fruitful,” Bryce says after Richelle recounts the previous night in excruciating detail (excluding the sex and Jace-encounter). It’s said gruffly without so much as a _shit weather, right?_ Or _how are you doing, my dearly traumatized punching bag?_ Bryce’s never wasted time on niceties, or, you know, _being nice_.

It’s the closest to a _thank you_ as she’s bound to get, so Richelle lets the disappointment roll off her like water off a duck. She’s an old hat at this part.

“No problem, B. Poor sucker made it too easy.”

She doesn’t mention the way he’d tasted salted and bitter on her tongue, like something decayed and unsanitary. She doesn’t mention the way he’d grunted between her thighs, or the way he’d kissed with far too much tongue. B only cares about the end result, and Richelle had delivered, so that’s all that matters.

“I have Diamond District tonight, right?” she confirms, more to break the silence than anything else.

Bryce’s eyes dart towards her, brow furrowed. After a quick scan that makes her feel transparent, B gives a tight nod and turns back to the Batcomputer, sifting through details at the speed of light.

Richelle, knowing B as well as she does, counts this as a dismissal.

(She wonders for a moment, keys in the ignition and eyes on that door she’d walked out of long ago _("Leave your keys,_ " Bryce said), if B can see how broken she is the way Jace can, and if she just doesn’t care enough to ask. Wonders if B can see the grief clinging to her like a veil, the pain like sweat effusing through her pores. She wonders if Bryce had seen the cracks in the marble she'd built as Robin when Jace had died and Don had died and Damian had died. She wonders if B had known she'd break like porcelain when she'd been pronounced dead, if she'd known Richelle had found relief in suffocation. She wonders, but she never asks, because she’s always been afraid of the answer.)

**Author's Note:**

> I'll include the full names list later <3


End file.
